It was just a quarter of a century ago, but it already belongs to another epoch. The black and white photos of the miners' strike have become blurred into the sepia record of centuries past, muddled up somewhere in our collective memory with the Blitz and the trenches.

I was at university at the time and the events seemed a very long away, geographically and culturally. But most of us felt an obligation to voice our support - without of course actually doing anything - for the pickets and their battles against a ruthless government. And, despite everything, I would still support them today. The miners' solidarity and persistence remains an inspiration; the brutality of their treatment cried out for redress.

Regardless of Arthur Scargill's attacks on me and his generous offer to asphixiate himself in the interests of science, I still have a great deal of respect for him. But environmentalists have to admit that the failure of the miners' strike and the subsequent closure of the pits saved us from what would otherwise have been the most divisive and internecine battle we would ever have fought.

Knowing what we do today about climate change, and the disproportionate role of coal, those of us who belong to the left would otherwise have found ourselves torn between support for the unions and antagonism towards the stuff they were digging out of the ground.

It hasn't gone away of course, but coal mining is now an entirely different business. Technological change means it's cheaper to take the ground away than to send men under it, so opencast mining — which causes staggering landscape destruction yet employs very few — piles on the misery for former mining families.

This means we are able to work with the people we might otherwise have fought. I hope that Arthur Scargill can join this battle. But first he would have to accept that the age of coal is over, and that his campaign to revive the pits was lost long, long ago. I can't really blame him for finding this impossible.